Most of us don’t think about problem-solving as a skill in its own right.

We think about solving a specific problem, and we look for help from people with expertise in that domain.

Yet almost every job posting asks for problem solving skills, and we all use them in our everyday lives.

Years of experience have taught me that you can learn to be a problem-solver without the need to be an expert in a particular topic. It’s a generalizable skillset, and it is teachable.

Even better, once you learn these problem-solving skills you can get far more value from any domain expert that you decide to turn to for specialist help.

So what is the relationship between the general skills and expert knowledge, and how can we use each to improve the other?

My work on Meta-Problem℠ codifies “expert-level problem solving” in a way that’s teachable and applicable across a wide range of domains.

My method says that to make a good decision you have to know your goals, your options, and how they connect. Because optimization is about mathematically modeling decisions, I know those basic components are universally applicable.

Using the method I have a language to ask questions instead of assuming. I see the core aspects of a decision as the goals, the choices we can reasonably make, and how each option is likely to impact the goals. So if someone recommend option A because it’s good at X, I might ask any of the following questions:

Understanding when to rewrite a question is also a crucial part of being a better problem-solver. These rewrites are where we move from a “bad” problem to a “good” one. That’s why experts rarely answer the question they have been asked.

They carefully sidestep to the answer they think you need and give you that instead. I have written about this in more depth here.

There are drawbacks to this approach. The expert might have missed something, and if part of the novice’s goal was to gain expertise, that secondary need went unmet. Best case scenario the novice knows what to do just this one time. Worst case, they’re on the wrong path even today.

Expert problem solvers are easy to recognize because of how they answer a question. Instead of just diving into the solution, they’ll talk about the problem and what’s interesting about it. They seem to start with unnecessary background, before eventually getting to the “aha” moment.

It’s often useful to understand not just what they are explaining, but also why they chose to emphasize certain points. There is likely some wrong path they are steering you away from by sharing their thought process.

Some people are asking an expert precisely so they don’t have to learn all the ins and outs themselves. And besides, when you’re a novice all those careful clues the expert is talking about? They go completely over your head.

So I’ve started trying to get permission before I answer the why as well as the so-what. One of my strengths is that for most expert-level understanding, I remember the thought process that helped it all make sense. Typically it’s about recognizing a single distinction between two things that that used to appear the same to me,

Pick some hobby of yours and think about the mistakes you made as a beginner. I’d be curious if you agree they generally came from some kind of distinction which as a novice you didn’t know about. For example, I remember learning as an adult that I was knitting through the wrong side of each loop.  I’d been knitting for over a decade, and some day between when I originally learned and when I joined a knitting group, I started making that mistake.

Taken one at a time as areas to become an expert in, you wouldn’t expect a lot of transferable skills. But if you treat developing expertise as mostly about learning those distinctions as quickly as possible, the patterns in one domain might translate to another. In which case, maybe the right focus can let you become an expert far faster.

Treating problem-solving as a cross domain skill allows me to see the patterns more easily for each new situation. Maybe I’m not immediately an expert in whatever field it is, but if I can make close to expert-level decisions, does it matter?